Second in the enka collection series on An’archives after Jojo Hiroshige & Shiraishi Tamio, this split LP features

À Qui Avec Gabriel and Tori Kudo

À Qui Avec Gabriel is an accordion player based in Tokyo who opened her discography with “Utsuho” on John Zorn’s label Tzadik in 2001 ( featuring Haino Keiji as a guest musician) . Since she has collaborated with Makoto Kawabata, Majutsu No Niwa, Mico to name a few. Her stylistic palette is eclectic, drawing on shades of jaunty european folk music, the elegant minimalism of Erik Satie, and uniquely lighthearted melancholia.

Here for the first time on record she left her accordion Gabriel for a piano and a seat and proves she’s found her own voice as an expressive singer.

The other side features Tori Kudo (Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Noise with his wife Reiko Kudo) who has a revered status in the Japanese underground since the late 70’s (Taco, Guys N’ Dolls, Fushitsusha…) but this time he brings listeners into the heart of an amazing and feverish karaoke house with his friends . For those who didn’t know it before, maybe for the very first time they are going to discover Tori Kudo as an inimitable & unforgettable crooner, as a true lover of popular songs.

Side A of this split LP features self-proclained “King of Noise”, Jojo Hiroshige, founder member of the legendary Hijokaidan and stalwart of the Japanese noise scene.

The B-side is engraved with the naked and guttural voice of sax-player Tamio Shiraishi, accompanied here by guitarist Malenkov

Both sides appropriate the Enka repetoire in remarkablky different ways. Jojo Hiroshige’s howled declamations and metallic scoria guitars chisel these old Enka ballads into something more monstrous while Malenkov’s flamenco arpeggios bandage torn lace around Shiriashi’s voice. Shiraishi recorded these songs in Uramado, a small kabuki-cho bar haunted by the ghosts of the Tokyo underground. Wandering through the streets of this floating world, one gets re-acquainted with those long lost voices of Enka.

This document is only a superficial incision into the exquisite corpse of the Japanese underground, a body of work where traditional and modern musical lines converge and take their rest, having now been cast into oblivion by the relentless changing trends. Enka music is deeply anchored in Japanese society and still remains influential today among those who frequent Karaoke bars where singing is the preferred language.

Split LP ltd to 150, comes in a silkscreened cover with obi and insert

A – Junko & Michel Henritzi

B – Michel Henritzi & Fukuoka Rinji

Side A is another love song between La Grande DameJunko (one of Japan’s foremost improvising vocalists and a member of long-running free-noise unit Hijokaidan) & Michel Henritzi (french guitarist and member of Dustbreeders and Howlin’Ghost Proletarians ). This is blues for the day, from noise to abstract blues, the volcanic meeting between voice and lapsteel.

Side B is blues for the night with Michel Henritzi and Fukuoka Rinji (Majutsu no Niwa – Overhang Party) , another sad story between guitar & violin recorded after Fukushima ‘s trauma. Ashes, asphyxiated air, cloudy and melancholic.

Le Jardin Bizarre » (the odd garden) is the follow up to the album “Outside Darkness”, released in 2011 by PSF. It is a hollow album, stretching out long rests in which a sticky melancholy, an infinite sadness amplifies itself. 6 tracks dark as so many gardens – gardens seen through night, 6 shades of black, 6 colours of silence. While “Outside Darkness” appeared like a shadow cast over Fukushima, “Le Jardin Bizarre” is it’s elegy. Disquieting calligrams made of tight, feverish strings, like black ink lines on a blank white page. Melodies as manifold as so many little pieces of night music, perforated by devouring rests, tunes dying in the echo. “Le Jardin Bizarre” is an asphyxiated, modern blues album – Mono No Aware or the melancholy of our times.

OUT OF PRINT

“ Swing Low, Sweet Silence”

Recorded live on september 29, 2004 at Super Deluxe, Tokyo, during the 20th anniversary celebration night of PSF and Alchemy labels.

Even the less skilled orator, even the worst speaker can give substance to the sounds coming out of their mouth, whether it be ramshackle, aphasic or even frigid” Jean-Jacques Lebel « Poésie en Action », Loques/Nèpe.

Here, on this record, the screamer and the whisperer sail away toward the worst, expelling from their bodies shredded songs whereon our senses shatter. Such a poetic extremity is not drawn from the cultural landscape, but from the breath of the living world. Raw poetry or a poetic racket made of copper whispers and screams of terror, erotic glossolalia and ramshackle choirs. They stand like two narrators, burnt in the hullabaloo of an infinitely melancholic melody, dislocating in great devouring rests, tuning back to an unheard of pitch, swirling in close combat. Tightrope walkers dancing above our inner abyss. lovers call and respond in the electric night.

Masayoshi Urabe. Lips split in two by the alto sax. Bag full of burning air blowing into brass. Dancing hysterically in the sound. When he plays the heavens are forced to lie at his feet, our listening experience swinging, spitting sticky melodies until beauty lies exhausted. He walks on the wild side to reach asphyxia, ending breathless, as testified by the recording. A brother only to Kaoru Abe and Albert Ayler. The same tragedian, the same single jealous chord to go swinging in sound. His art is reminiscent of a sonic Seppuku, splitting his body in half as well as our understanding. Sublime and tragic, with a murky erotic charge. Nothing remains after the music fades but a burning fire.

Junko is like a white shade after Hiroshima. Her overexposed diaphanous body, her scream, miles away from the hysteria of other yellers in the noise music landscape. It is just terror, or call it beauty. She almost appears disconnected from herself, as if her voice were detached from her body, each evolving in a separate space. Her punctured tongue giving access to the unutterable and unspeakable. Dyslexic, monstrous voice, rising to inhuman high pitches, held on the threshold of auditory pain, almost endlessly. Junko’s scream recalls the phrasing of free music saxophonists, a common musical naivety devoid of academicism and technique. Her voice is her own erotic body, her “music”, to quote Mishima.

Voice and alto sax magnetically unite under the white lights of the stage, abolishing space and time like lovers do. Bound to one another in a beautiful confusion of timbres, whispers, phrases and stories.